What Happened to Fossil Fighters?

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It has been a bit since the last “What Happened to” post. It’s back this week with a game series that I enjoyed as a kid, Fossil Fighters. Fossil Fighters is a turn based RPG series that was developed by Nintendo and Red Entertainment. There are a total of three games in the series, with the first game releasing in 2008.

What is Fossil Fighters?

The Fossil Fighters series is an RPG monster battler like Digimon or Pokemon. What made Fossil Fighters different is that you had to dig up fossils and break open those fossils in order to get new dinosaurs, called Vivosaurs. You needed to dig up a skull fossil in order to revive them. Each subsequent fossil you dug up for a Vivosaur made them stronger and gave them access to new abilities. Each Vivosaur can be one of the following elements: fire, water, earth, air, or neutral.

How do you get Vivosaurs?

What makes this series a bit different is that you don’t capture or fight wild Vivosaurs, except in the last game. To get new Vivosaurs to use in fights you’ll need to dig for their fossil. Each one has 4 different parts you can find: Head, legs, body, and arms. You need to find the head to actually revive them. When you find a new fossil you won’t know what it is until after you’ve gone through the cleaning process. After the fossil has been cleaned, if you dig up a fossil part you’ve dug up already it will let you know.

Digging and Cleaning

You read that right. Digging them up is only one part of the equation. After you dig them up you’ll need to clean the fossil. The cleaning is a timed mini game where you have several different tools that you’ll need to use to dig the bone out of the fossil.  Be careful digging them out as each time you clean a Fossil you’ll get a score based on how much of the bone you uncovered as well as how damaged the bone was during the cleaning process. This score is assigned to that Fossil and has an impact on your Vivosaur’s stats. If you don’t like the score you can find another fossil and clean it again. If you get a higher score it will replace the on you’ve currently got.

In order for the cleaning to be successful you need to have a 50% or higher. If you have lower than 50% you will fail the cleaning and the fossil will be destroyed.

What are battles like?

You can have a total of five in your party. Three spots are the ones you will take into battle. The other two spots are reserve spots where you can edit your party using those two when preparing for a battle. You’ll need to visit a machine if you wish to rearrange your party. For battles they are turned based with each person having a max team of three. As each turn passes you get LP which is used to perform attacks. There are attack skills that will deal damage and may have an extra effect like poisoning the enemy or a support skill like healing. The battles can get pretty strategic as there are even team combinations that you can use. Instead of levels, ranks are used. Points are gained to rank up by winning battles and finding more parts of a Vivosaur.

There are some pieces of combat that I’ve probably missed, but that covers the basics. With most of the basics out of the way we can get into each game. I’ll be discussing overall reviews, changes made in the sequels, as well as sharing a song or two from their OSTs.

Fossil Fighters

This is the game that started the series. It was released in 2008 for the Nintendo DS in Japan and released the next year in other countries. In this game you’ll arrive on Vivosaur island with the goal of rising through the ranks to become a Master fighter. As you progress through the game you’ll get access to different areas of the island as well as being able to get new Vivosaurs. There are 100 Vivosaurs to revive with even more that you can unlock by meeting certain conditions in the game.

I played this back when I was a kid and enjoyed the game a lot. I think I played through it fully twice. Having to dig up the fossils and clean them to get new Vivosaurs was a pretty cool concept. Another thing that I liked was that sometimes when you would dig up a fossil a NPC would appear with the fossil and challenge you to a battle for it. The combat was a bit more strategic than other turn based games as not only did you need to think about type match ups, but you also had to think about the positioning of your Vivosaurs on your field. Certain team compositions can also have a huge impact on battles by giving different effects in battles.

As for review scores, IGN gave the game a 5.9. It received a bit more favorable reviews on Metacritic with a 70 for the critic score and a 8.2 for the user score.

Fossil Fighter Champions

Fossil Fighters Champions released in November of 2011 in North America. Though it’s the second game in the series you don’t have to play the first one. The story of this game is completely separate featuring new characters. There weren’t too many changes between the previous game and this one. Changes include being able to choose a male or female character, new Vivosaurs, and new types of fossils to dig up. One of these new fossils has the legs, head, and body of one Vivosaur.

I enjoyed Champions more than the first game. Part of what made it better was that you’re taking part in a tournament as part of the story. I also liked the story, there were some good twists in there that I didn’t expect. I would recommend this one over the first game, but both are still good. Fossil Fighters Champions has a metacritic score of 68 based on critic reviews and a 7.9 based on user scores.

Fossil Fighters Frontier

The last Fossil Fighters game released was Fossil Fighters Frontier. It was released in 2014 for the Nintendo 3DS. I have the least experience with this one as I never got the chance to play it and didn’t know it had released until years after. It was released on the 3DS. Just like the previous game, you do not have to have played the previous games as the story and characters are new. For this section I’ll show some info from the webpage that’s still up and compare the review score to the previous two games.

Fossil Fighters Frontier looks to be the worst reviewed one. It sits at a 57 on metacritic from reviews and an audience score of 5.2. There seem to have been a lot of changes between this game and the previous ones. One of the biggest changes is that you travel around in a vehicle instead of walking around like the other games.

Another big change is to the combat. You now only control one Vivosaur in battle instead of three. Two others are controlled by NPCs. Players can also encounter wild Vivosaurs which was not possible in the previous two games. Like I mentioned earlier, I didn’t play this one so I don’t have any personal experience to share. This was also the only game in the series that released in Europe, which is a shame. I hate when an entire region gets skipped over for releases.

What I Think Happened

I think that the series discontinued due to the low review scores of the last game and that people saw it as a lesser version of Pokemon that didn’t seem to stand out enough. Looking at several reviews, you’ll see Pokemon mentioned often. I do wish more people had given this series a chance as it was truly unique having you have to dig up and clean fossils for new Vivosaurs to use. The battles were also pretty strategic as you control three Vivosaurs at a time and can rotate them around in order to gain an advantage or protect one of your Vivosaurs. I’d love to see the series make a return, but unfortunately I don’t think that will ever happen.

Conclusion

As a bonus I’ll provide the link to the original websites for all three games. The way the website is setup makes it a bit hard to translate. They mostly used images with text on them so there isn’t any text for the browser to translate. If you want to translate anything you’ll need to get the alternate text of the images and put them into google translate.

Have you ever heard of the Fossil Fighters series before? Does the game sound like something you would play? As always thank you all for reading!

Website Links

• Fossil Fighters site: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ds/ykhj/index.html
• Fossil Fighters Champions: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ds/vdej/index.html
• Fossil Fighter Frontier: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/3ds/ahrj/index.html

Sources:

• Fossil Fighters site: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ds/ykhj/index.html
• Fossil Fighters Champions: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ds/vdej/index.html
• Fossil Fighter Frontier: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/3ds/ahrj/index.html
• https://fossilfighters.fandom.com/wiki/Vivosaurs